The Suburbia Project is a bit of a conceit. For a start, it’s not actually a project. It is, though, a coherent body of work that started with an intense 2—3 years project with Christchurch City Council to develop their medium density response after the earthquake. What they were after wasn’t just another report stacked full of principles, but practical and economic solutions for a NZ context.
Well, that’s a lot harder than it sounds. Just saying.
So, Suburbia, eh? Can’t live with it; can’t live without it. Apparently. Suburbia is the big bull elephant in the room. The truly urban isn’t really a problem. We can grow it, shrink it, intensify it, finesse those land-uses, groom the networks. Theory translates well into practice and when we apply care, things work out. But when we put the ‘sub’ in front of urban, that’s when things really start to fall apart.
Suburbia is an artifact of ‘precinctisation’ – a word as hideous as it is invented – as well as a failure of planning imagination. Predominantly residential areas are not new, but their scale and land-use exclusivity developed over the last 50—75 years have diminished the functionality and quality of the city to a near-intolerable extent. Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem to be an impossible situation – we have a clear vision of how it could/should be, after all. But the vision never seems to connect with reality. At every failure, planning gets more and more complex to compensate, and our goal moves further and further away.
But back to those CCC origins. After the intensity and (I think it’s fair to say) success of those first few years, we felt we could finally leave the manifesto in the drawer and slide straight into sitting alongside councils to help give effect everywhere else to what we’d resolved in Christchurch. Naive, I know, although it is happening, slowly, after a fashion. There’s friction, of course. It comes from both the fractured internal structure of councils where there’s little understanding the principles (or where there’s no framework in which to apply them) as much as it is from an industry resistant to change – despite the prospect of higher profitability for them.
After refining NZ versions of classical (sub)urban elements in Christchurch, a big part of our subsequent work has been research into objective and accurate design-quality assessment. Often this has involved comparative analysis using existing ‘traditional’ examples – the educative part of what we do. But always the aim is to assist councils in their decision-making and processing structures. Running parallel with this design research is the development of supporting design technologies for use by the industry that can mesh with council process.
The Suburbia Project is simply a space where some of this research piles up. Our flotsam, for sure, washed in on the tide. These are some of the water-proofed survivors we continue to build our next-gen research body on top of.
